Targeting the SOHO market, Western Digital's Red drives are specifically built for NAS in RAID configurations.

There's a new colour in town.
(Credit: Western Digital)

While Western Digital's green drives have been popular NAS candidates, they were never designed with 24/7 use in mind. They also didn't ship with TLER enabled, which could ultimately result in disks dropping from the array.

No doubt chewing into the market share of its enterprise grade Raid Edition (RE) drives, the Red drives feature TLER by default, have a decent NAS compatibility list, support ATA streaming for better A/V use, extra anti-vibration tech to deal with being nestled next to other hard drives and still don't do a permanent 7200RPM — that's right, they use "Intellipower" spindle technology, which, like its green drives, will modify the spindle speed to favour power usage.

What's interesting is the three-year warranty, along with 24/7 phone support in the US — Western Digital will have more to say about the local offering on 17 July, including prices. Acronis' True Image is also bundled with the drives for data portability.

Coming in 1TB, 2TB and 3TB capacities with 64MB cache, Storage Review has the first in-depth look at the device — head over that way to see how the new offering performs.

About the author

Craig was sucked into the endless vortex of tech at an early age, only to be spat back out babbling things like "phase-locked-loop crystal oscillators!". Mostly this receives a pat on the head from the listener, followed closely by a question about what laptop they should buy.
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